by Toland, John
Zeros came hurtling at Lanphier and he opened fire.
“Leave the Zeros, Tom,” Mitchell called from far above. “Bore in on the bombers. Get the bombers. Damn it all, the bombers!”
Ugaki’s plane was barely skimming the jungle. “What happened?” he asked the plane commander, who was bracing himself in the aisle.
“I think there is some operational mistake,” he said.
Ugaki looked up and saw a tangle of Zeros and Lightnings. Where was Yamamoto? The other bomber abruptly swung off and disappeared.
Two of Lanphier’s planes were already out of action; one pilot couldn’t release his belly tanks and his wing man had to stay with him. It was up to Lanphier and his own wing man, Lieutenant Rex T. Barber, to shoot down the two bombers. Lanphier fought his way past three Zeros, kicked his plane over on its back. He caught a glimpse of a bomber below. He plunged down and loosed a long, steady burst. The Mitsubishi’s right engine and wing flamed up.
Barber closed in on the other Mitsubishi. He opened fire and could see the bomber shudder. He continued raking the plane, and the top of its tail section disintegrated. Barber hurtled by. He looked back and was sure he saw “debris rising from the jungle.” Both he and Lanphier were sure they had shot down the first bomber, Yamamoto’s.
Ugaki had seen his commander’s plane crash into the jungle. “Look at Yamamoto’s plane!” Stunned, he pointed to a pillar of black smoke. “It’s over!” His own plane shimmied from a hit in the right wing and plunged toward the sea. The pilot held back on the controls but could not stop the dive. The Mitsubishi careened into the water.
“This is the end of Ugaki!” he told himself as water enfolded him. He didn’t try to struggle in the darkness. As in a dream he saw light above and felt himself rising to the surface. He gasped for breath. A wing was burning; everything else had disappeared. He was two hundred yards from shore and began swimming, using breaststrokes. Exhausted, he reached for a float-box but couldn’t hang on and only then realized that his right arm was broken. He clung to the box with his left hand and kicked his way to the shore.
The first Lightnings returning to Henderson Field did barrel rolls and those on the ground knew Yamamoto had been shot down. A message went out to Halsey:
POP GOES THE WEASEL. P-38’S LED BY MAJOR JOHN W. MITCHELL USA VISITED KAHILI AREA ABOUT 0930. SHOT DOWN TWO BOMBERS ESCORTED BY ZEROS FLYING CLOSE FORMATION. ONE SHOT BELIEVED TO BE TEST FLIGHT. THREE ZEROS ADDED TO THE SCORE SUM TOTAL SIX. ONE P-38 FAILED RETURN. APRIL 18 SEEMS TO BE OUR DAY.
Halsey read the message the next morning at his regular conference. Admiral Turner “whooped and applauded.” “Hold on, Kelly,” said Halsey. “What’s so good about it? I’d hoped to lead that scoundrel up Pennsylvania Avenue in chains, with the rest of you kicking him where it would do the most good!” He ordered the story withheld from the press. It might reveal to the Japanese that their code had been broken.‡
Commander Watanabe, overwhelmed with grief, supervised the cremation of Yamamoto’s body. He put the ashes in a small wooden box lined with papaya leaves. At Truk he boarded Musashi for the sad trip home. On May 21 the superbattleship arrived in Tokyo Bay and a radio announcer told the nation in a choked voice that Yamamoto had “met gallant death in a war plane.”
His ashes were divided and put into two urns for two ceremonies, one in Nagaoka, Yamamoto’s birthplace, and the other for a state funeral. The latter took place on June 5—the anniversary of the funeral of Japan’s other great naval hero, Admiral Togo. A million citizens lined the streets of Tokyo to watch the cortege. Commander Watanabe, carrying his former chess partner’s sword, walked right behind the artillery caisson on which the ashes were mounted. They were interred in Hibiya Park.
Yamamoto’s successor, Admiral Mineichi Koga, said, “There was only one Yamamoto and no one can replace him.”
The tragic death of their greatest war hero was “an insupportable blow” to the Japanese people. Moreover, it closely followed the grim announcement that the United States had retaken the Aleutian island of Attu. Propagandists attempted to present the death of 2,351 Japanese on that dreary island off Alaska as an inspirational epic that would be “a tremendous stimulant to the fighting spirit of our nation.”
But the Emperor himself was deeply distressed. “In the future, please see to it that you have a reasonable chance of success before launching into an operation,” he told Army Chief of Staff Sugiyama—and then unburdened himself at length in the presence of his chief aide-de-camp, General Shigeru Hasunuma. “They [the Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff] should have foreseen that such a situation would develop. Instead it took them a week to prepare countermeasures after the enemy landed on May twelfth. They mentioned something about ‘heavy fog,’ but they should have known about the fog.… Are the Navy and the Army really frank with each other? It seems as if one makes an impossible demand, and the other irresponsibly promises to fulfill it. Whatever the two agree upon must be carried out. If they can’t accomplish what they promise each other, it’s worse than making the promises in the first place. If there is friction between the Army and the Navy, this war cannot be concluded successfully. They must be completely open with each other in planning their operations.… If we continue getting involved in such operations it will only help raise enemy morale, as in the case of Guadalcanal. Neutral nations will waver; China will be encouraged, and it will have a serious effect on the nations of the Greater East Asia Sphere. Isn’t there any way we can confront the United States forces somewhere and beat them? … Sugiyama was saying something to the effect that a Decisive Battle by the Navy should ‘finish off’ this war, but it is an impossible idea.”
The fall of Attu also engendered outspoken criticism of Imperial Headquarters by high-ranking Navy officers. “We should have just pounded Attu and withdrawn from there,” Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi told a civilian friend, Yoshio Kodama—the same Kodama who had plotted with Tsuji to assassinate Prince Konoye. “But we took a foolish liking to the place and poured in too much matériel and unnecessary personnel, making it impossible to leave. There are also many islands like that in the south.”
Kodama said he thought Japan’s strategy was “too much concerned with outward show.”
Onishi was in accord. “Just as the Army and Navy are squabbling over every trivial thing, Air Force headquarters and Fleet Administration headquarters are, as you know, at loggerheads with each other. No matter how often we point out the absolute necessity of strengthening the air force, Fleet Administration headquarters sticks to its old ideas of ‘Fleet First’ and can only view the overall situation in this light. In the final analysis, unless the Navy itself is driven up against the wall, it won’t get around to reforming those things which should be reformed. But when that comes it will already be too late.”
Onishi’s rancor went beyond the general progress of the war. He felt that Fleet Administration headquarters and its outmoded ideas of “Fleet First” were overriding the more important needs of the air force. His, of course, was a parochial point of view but it reflected the growing rivalry between individual departments, civilian as well as military.
The slow but significant drop in production aggravated the situation. Losses of matériel in battle could no longer be replaced and even the minimum requirements of the Army and Navy could not be met. Not only had commanders of occupied areas failed to develop local natural resources but a mere fraction of what was produced reached the homeland because of Japan’s limited merchant marine and America’s devastating submarine assaults on the ships taking the long trip north.
This crippling lack of raw materials was compounded by controls that often overlapped and were inconsistent. Economic mobilization in the United States, on the other hand, was accelerating. While the output in Japan under the stimulus of war had risen one-fourth, that in America had gone up about two-thirds, and Japan’s manufacturing efficiency was but 35 percent that of her enemy’s. More significant, Japan’s gross national product
(using 1940 as an index basis of 100) had gone up a meager 2 points by the beginning of 1943, while America’s had climbed to 136. Moreover, it was a well-planned expansion on all levels. The Japanese had failed to diversify. Their output of munitions had soared—but at the expense of nonmilitary items. The ten years before Pearl Harbor had seen such growth in production that the leaders had assumed they could carry on a major war without any substantial enlargement.
Confronted with reality, they made every effort to raise the general level. Within a few months, the gross national product was on the upswing. Total output showed a marked increase and production of military items climbed higher than ever. The prospect was promising, but was it too late?
Shipping remained the most crucial problem. The carefully allotted budget was upset by the fall of Attu and the secret evacuation of the nearby island of Kiska.§ With these two bridgeheads in the Aleutians gone, the Kurile Islands would have to be fortified and manned. All this would divert a vast amount of shipping from the beleaguered areas in the south.
The liaison conference came to grips with this emergency in June, concluding that the Kuriles had to be turned into a fortress even though it meant national power would suffer a loss: the production of iron would have to be lowered 250,000 tons, aluminum 6,000 tons and coal 650,000 tons.
“We are facing a grave crisis,” Colonel Tanemura wrote in his “Diary” that night. It was a crisis made more acrimonious by the debilitating struggle between the Army and the Navy for strategic materials. Admiral Soemu Toyoda began referring to the Army as “horse dung.” In public he declared that he would rather his daughter married a beggar than an Army man.
The debate on shipping was abruptly overshadowed a few days later, on June 30, by the announcement that the hiatus in the Solomons was over. Admiral Halsey had leapfrogged his amphibious force halfway up The Slot to the island of New Georgia, the key to the central Solomons. The Japanese garrison was on the alert, and reinforcements soon brought its strength up to five thousand, but the defenders could not repel the Army and Marine divisions that had splashed ashore. It could be no more than a matter of weeks before the island was overrun. Then there would be little between the Americans and strategic Bougainville.
The Emperor summoned the Prime Minister. Tojo left the audience shaken by His Majesty’s “grave concern” and sent for the man whose advice he had often relied upon, General Kenryo Sato. His face a mask, Tojo said, “Ask the General Staffs where they plan to stop the enemy.”
“We will never get an answer,” Sato replied. “Neither the Army nor the Navy can possibly draw up a plan to stop them.” Tojo was silent but his face could no longer hide his distress.
“What happened at the Palace?” Sato asked.
“The Emperor is very worried about all this,” Tojo muttered and lapsed into silence again.
“What exactly did the Emperor say?” Sato prodded him.
The Prime Minister abruptly straightened up from his slouch and said, “To tell the truth, the Emperor said, ‘You keep repeating that the Imperial Army is invulnerable, yet whenever the enemy lands you lose the battle. You’ve never been able to repulse an enemy landing. Can’t you do it somewhere? How is this war going to turn out?’ ”ǁ He shrugged his shoulders as if to make light of what he had just revealed. “Well, he said something to that effect.”
But Sato insisted that by uttering such words to his Prime Minister, the Emperor must have concluded that he wouldn’t get a direct answer from either the Army or Navy Chief of Staff. “That’s probably why he finally put the question to you. And if that’s the case, I repeat, it’s a grave matter. He must be losing confidence in the military.”
Tojo protested that Sato went too far. “What I said now is not exactly the Emperor’s words. He didn’t express lack of confidence in the military. On the other hand, I do admit he was sorely troubled. I’m going to speak to Sugiyama. You talk to the Operations chief, and then we must come up with some measure. It is extremely urgent. Without saying it’s an order of the Emperor, we must insist on a definite strategic plan indicating exactly where we can stem the enemy counteroffensive and where our last defense line should be.”
Sato was in agreement and, moreover, added an urgent admonition: “We must also conduct our political strategy with all this in mind.”
The central instrument of Japan’s political aims was still the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and if Japan was losing the battle of production, she was winning the battle of propaganda throughout a large part of the continent. It was a policy that envisaged an Asia united “in the spirit of universal brotherhood” under the leadership of Japan, with each nation allotted its “proper place” by the Emperor; it would lead to peace and prosperity. Established in November 1938 by the first Konoye government, it had already induced millions of Asians to co-operate in the war against the West.
It had been created by idealists who wanted to free Asia from exploitation by the white man. As with many dreams, it was taken over and exploited by realists. First came those who looked upon Southeast Asia with its wealth of natural resources as a solution to economic ills; Japan could not remain a modern state under the humiliating domination of trade by the West. Militarists also saw in its policy the answer to their most pressing need—raw materials for war—and became its most ardent champions. What had gone from idealism to opportunism now developed into an unlikely combination of both. Corrupted as the Co-prosperity Sphere was by the militarists and their nationalist supporters, its call for Pan-Asianism remained relatively undiminished in its appeal to the masses.
Colonialism with its concomitant exploitation had helped raise Asia out of the mire of its past. But by the turn of the century its historical role had been fulfilled and colonialism itself was challenged by the rise of nationalism. Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic demand for the self-determination of nations after World War I seemed to apply to Asians as well as Europeans. But the promised democracy never came to the East, where colonies remained colonies; the West had two standards of freedom, one for itself and one for those east of Suez. With each year the gap between East and West widened as the Western masters, particularly the British, offered mere patchwork reforms.
Except for China, a continent that should have been ripe for revolution remained dormant; rebels of each country waited for someone else to revolt first. They no longer looked to democratic leaders; instead, their idols were dictators like Hitler, who had achieved dramatic diplomatic and military victories over England and France. All over Asia the Fascist salute and the worker’s clenched fist vied for popularity.
Britain’s attempts to win support from Asians in her war against the Axis were met with derision. In 1940 Dr. Ba Maw, who had been educated at Cambridge and became the first premier of Burma, warned his parliament to remember Britain’s “idealistic” war aims in World War I. “With the same moral fervour she declared that in fighting Germany she was defending the smaller nationalities; she was making the world safe for democracy; … and she had absolutely no territorial ambitions.… But what was the result? What happened when the battle and the shouting were done and the victors obtained their victory? The British Empire added to itself roughly a million and a half square miles of new territory as a result of the war. What happened to the doctrine of self-determination? When I, with my usual recklessness, mentioned self-determination before the Joint Select Committee at the time the Committee was hammering out Burma’s constitution, the British representatives were amused.” But this seditious speech was not amusing to the British and Ba Maw was thrown in jail.
The next year the signing of the Atlantic Charter by Churchill and Roosevelt again brought a glimmer of hope to some Asian political leaders that the West had at last dropped its double standard of freedom. Hadn’t it proclaimed “the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live”? Churchill soon made it clear, however, that the Charter did not apply to the British colonies—in other words, only to white
nations.
The time, therefore, was more than ripe for wide acceptance of Japan’s rallying cry for a Pan-Asia. Since the middle of the previous century, her own independence had been a constant reminder that Asians could be free. Admiral Togo’s crushing defeat of the Russian fleet in 1905 had marked the emergence of Asia from Western domination and given all Orientals a sense of pride. The fall of Singapore in 1942 gave more dramatic proof that the white man was not invincible. The sight of the British retreating on all fronts was heady to Asians, and much of the continent was about ready to actively ally itself with the victors.
The glaring exception, of course, was China, where hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops were still entangled in a frustrating, endless battle. Most Japanese could not see why Chiang Kai-shek continued to fight. Wasn’t it obvious that he was being used as a tool by Churchill and Roosevelt?a There were some liberal Japanese, however, who had always opposed Japan’s occupation of China. One was Mamoru Shigemitsu, the ambassador to the collaborationist puppet government in Nanking. He was now arguing that the success of the Co-prosperity Sphere depended on a just solution of the China problem. How could Japan call for the end of colonialism while treating a large part of China like a colony? The unequal treaties that existed with Nanking should be abolished and economic aid offered without restrictions.
Tojo, who had fully supported the war in China as a militarist, saw the issue in a different perspective as prime minister, and welcomed Shigemitsu’s proposal. There was stubborn resistance from Army leaders, but by the beginning of 1943 Tojo had persuaded them that the best way to get raw materials from China was to adopt the Shigemitsu plan. Arrangements were made to return the Japanese settlements in Soochow, Hankow, Hangchow and Tientsin to the Nanking government, and new treaties were negotiated. Shigemitsu was recalled to Tokyo to become the new foreign minister and in the Diet he urged again and again that all of East Asia be freed from military occupation and given political freedom. “For Japan it means the establishment of the ‘good neighbor’ policy and the improvement of our international relations.”